it is not part of the ITS, but the core rulebook has a chapter called End Game and it does cover situations where you have a limited time to play and even mention it is often used in tournaments (which would include both ITS tournament and non-ITS tournament) :
Fair point. Too many general rules and ITS rules are mixing together. Yet by the wording of this rule there is nothing against clocks.
If players are already slow I can't imagine that making them push a clock button every time they declare a short skill or ARO is going to speed them up. Slow play is generally because folks are inexperienced or are unable to make decisions. Adding extra complications and pressure will help neither of those deficiencies
Simple, it makes the game end with them losing. This is a terrible system for a chill local game but a solid solution for large tournaments. If the player cannot increase their speed of play then they lose. That player needs to decide faster or perhaps gain a little more experience. That said I doubt experience will directly cause the time limit but inexperience driven analysis paralysis will and so a newer player won't always suffer this, and putting them on a clock could solve this. The only issue I have with this is the amount of time swapping to be potentially annoying. If it's just active on your turn unless if their aro takes to long, I can see it being less cumbersome. But not even sure if this is needed, as just the ability to report your opponent of slow play and standard gaming etiquette, games happened easily on time.
I’m all for players speeding up their play (see my above post on how we try to do that locally). But I’m not a fan of “play fast or lose” for infinity’s tournament scene. Chess clocks will do more harm than good if they become a common or necessary component to ITS. Here’s why: 1) The clock becomes a critical part of the strategic landscape. Fast lists will be advantaged over slow ones (for instance, a LI list vs. a spammy list). There would be strong incentive to create situations that are not tactically relevant to the mission objectives but designed to burn your opponents clock. 2) Scoring would have to be rebuilt. If I’m up on objective points, but I run out of clock, how is that handled? Do I auto lose? Do I lose some amount of points? Does the game just end? What if my opponent had time to score some objectives, and I’m starving him of those points by running out my clock as soon as I know I'm going to lose? 3) What about shared time? When I ask my opponent if they have line of sight to my model, who’s time is being spent, hers to check, or mine for asking? What about when I am explaining my deployment to my opponent? When we roll dice? The clock incentivizes not communicating well to save time. 4) Barrier to entry for new tourney players. There’s a big difference between a new player who is trying to learn their army or the game and thus being slow, and someone like me playing slow to starve you of your next turn. Let’s not treat them the same by tying it all to the clock. We have mechanisms to deal with actual slow play, both socially and structurally, and I don't think adding another is going to help. TOs are there to manage these kinds of problems when they crop up, we can tell our opponent to hurry up if they're dragging things out, and that's about it.
This isn't anything new for chess clocks. If you're playing a tournament with a schedule, you already have to make a decision about what to do when the time runs out and the players aren't done. And, you're just pointing out that the "How do you score when the time runs out?" decision has to be made for both the out-of-time player and the in-time player because there's more to the score than win or lose. You can make the same arguments about playing a tournament on a schedule. Minimum required sportsmanship standards have to be enforced, even though people are in a hurry. "We have mechanisms to deal with actual slow play". When you end your sentence with "we can tell our opponent to hurry up" and "that's about it", you're presenting a case study in denial of a problem. People advocate chess clocks because those mechanisms for dealing with slow play at a tournament don't work. You either end up with a game that doesn't play to completion, and gets scored anyway; or you have to make the TO be the bad guy and decide after the game is done who's fault it is. My continuing complaint about chess clocks is that people keep advocating for their use, without wanting to have a discussion about how to use them in a fair manner in a complicated game like Infinity where you need to have a lot of cooperation between the players. Just spit-balling, but I think it'd be easier to deal with timing an Infinity game using a Blitz style time setup. Each turn, you get X minutes (10 or 15 minutes) of slow thought time. After your slow though time runs out, the clock switches to 30 seconds or a minute per order. When the clock runs out, you're done declaring new things for the order. Something like that would be worth looking at as a compromise, making people play to the game schedule.
I'm pointing out that the scoring system of infinity doesn't deal well with an instant loss mechanism, and that any time-based point deduction strategy is easily gamed by bad actors and incidentially punishes new players. I can elaborate if you'd like. Well, as you'll see in the quoted text, those were two different sentences. The first was saying we have mechanisms, which is true. Your claim is that those mechanisms don't work (I'd say they're imperfect, but as functional as anything is likely to be), and would be improved through some sort of independent timing approach (which I think will be fraught with new problems at the expense of inexperienced players). Ultimately, good play in a game like infinity requires participation in the social contract by both players; there's not a game mechanism that gets around that. I advocate for good play awards in tourneys, which I think helps reinforce those good behaviors and doesn't punish new guys/gals. So I think this runs into a lot of the problems I have with the other clock system, in that it lumps in someone who is playing slow to get advantage with someone who is playing slow because they are new/learning. To me, punishing your new players as if they were quasi cheaters isn't going to help this community. Again, I think we all know when someone is screwing around wasting time in a game, and we should call them on it. If that doesn't work, it falls to the TO. If that doesn't work, I don't see how a clock is going to fix it.
TO calling out the time is sufficient. Chess clock use is really complicated by the cooperative turn structure IMO. I built a relatively simple timer for academic conferences that changes color (green --> yellow --> red) at set time intervals. Those intervals and the overall countdown are all parameters you can modify easily. I haven't TOed a tourney in a long time, but would consider placing a laptop running a countdown clock in a location that is easily seen by all players.
